Film’s mimetic movements induce viewers to fall into step before any story registers

Evidence

That, among its functions, film provides models for collective behaviour is not just an additional imposition of ideology. Such collectivity, rather, inheres in the innermost elements of film. The movements which the film presents are mimetic impulses which, prior to all content and meaning, incite the viewers and listeners to fall into step as if in a parade. In this respect, film resembles music just as, in the early days of radio, music resembled film strips. It would not be incorrect to describe the constitutive subject of film as a ‘we’ in which the aesthetic and sociological aspects of the medium converge. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 266

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Deep Listening / soundscape notes on the physical, pre-cognitive body responding to sonic-mimetic impulses — a shared embodied-audience line. — connects to: Nolan’s films stage the reversal where the manipulator becomes the manipulated. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 518